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Gutenkarte maps locations mentioned in project gutenberg texts. Very cool idea, though the UI seems a little twitchy. I think you are supposed to be able to click on place names to see where the place is mentioned in the text, but it doesn’t seem to work consistently.

Gutenkarte is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature. Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta’s GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find.

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Mozilla Thunderbird has a really annoying “bug” when dealing with messages with large attachments on an IMAP server. For some reason or another, it will often only download a part of the attachments, and then stop, never to finish, ever.

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A few weeks ago I blogged a link to an article about kids using a “high pitched ringtone for school situations”:http://geekfun.com/2006/05/25/too-good-to-be-true/. The kids had appearantly repurposed a horrible sound used in a teenager repelling device called the Mosquito that took advantage of the fact that most adults are deaf to high frequencies.

It seemed just too perfect a story that the kids had coopted the teenager-repeller into a method of getting away with receiving text messages in class.

I’m still skeptical about the origins, but the story has been picked up by the New York Times, and other media outlets, and I’ve been getting a bunch of hits on this blog from people looking for more info.

So, I did a little digging and found an “MP3 of the horrid mosquito ring tone”:http://geekfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/HorridRINGTONE.mp3. I’ll warn you, if you can hear it (I can), it sounds head-splittingly awful, so take of your headphones and turn down the volume.